The game is one of carefully calculated maneuvers, coupled with feline reflexes, a predictive range of sight, and just some general know-how when it comes to pendulum swings and the ensuing momentum and velocity. Sound intriguing? Well, it’s not quite that in depth, but it’s still really engaging, and does employ some of the aforementioned characteristics. The game opens, without warning, to a scene of magma encrusted rocks with gray spheres dotting the screen at random locations, with your ascent ball centered at the bottom. The music is melancholy sci-fi, swimming in a thudding, murky mystery, and getting you lost in the ether – it’s an odd combination with the game’s setting, but somehow works at getting you more engrossed. At first, it might take you awhile (less, though, now that you’re reading this review) before you figure out that your ball takes ascent by latching, by magnetic tractor beam it seems, to the randomly assorted gray balls that hover onscreen. According to the tutorial – a tutorial that actually makes the game easier to understand, unlike most games – these gray balls are mines, currently unarmed. To ascend to the upper echelons of the the magma filled center of earth, and then beyond, you must hoist yourself up with the assistance of these mines, taking care to let go, after building the proper momentum, so you can fling yourself away from any proximity to the mine, to avoid colliding with it. Why? Because once you grapple onto a mine, that particular mine becomes armed, and we all know what happens to an armed mine once touched – KABLOOIE! Should you ever forget that mines are dangerous, the game reminds you by affixing a giant, red, warning target around the mine in use. Yes, I highly recommend not touching any mines, if you can help it, otherwise it’s game over, and start from the bottom again you must. To make matters more difficult, there is more than one kind of mine, because mines that simply explode upon contact, apparently, isn’t interesting enough for both the consumer and developer. No, there are mines that fall once you attach to them, mines that aren’t affected by your grapple, mines, thankfully, that give you a much needed upward boost, and mines, even, that will chase you for a bit after using them. Scary. Power-ups will help you in your route, things like Sticky Ascenders that make your ball stick to the wall, and Ascender Shields that protect you from explosions.

Based on this convoluted description, you may be leery of the game, thinking it too confounding to handle. Well, trust me, it is a difficult game – I have yet to see any scenescape other than the magma fields – but it’s well worth your time, and yes, even frustration. Ascent could very well be the most captivating, simple game I’ve come across, and this is no small feat to accomplish. It has all the addictiveness of Doodle Jump, with just as much difficulty, requiring you to develop a keen awareness of the sensitivity of your every move, your every decision. The movements are fluid, and the physics realistic – depending on the velocity of your ball’s upward projectile, you may find that grappling onto the a faraway mine may result in your ball crashing at the bottom, the downward momentum too much for your stretchy tractor beam to handle, and your weight bearing too much a load on the mine, gravity pulling it down with you (not all of them are statically positioned). It’s a bit like a bungee cord, your tractor beam, so you would be wise to think in terms of relative distance and how it affects your speed. Then again, don’t always rely on using nearby mines because you may just underestimate the speed at which you’re pulled toward them, resulting in a surprising collision and game over. Ascent certainly keeps you on your toes, and that is its most compelling feature.

Well, that and you’re playing as a geodesic ball hurtling through the nether regions of the planet by magnetic fields surrounding mines. That’s pretty compelling, too.

After playing it, I’ve decided Numbl is definitely my choice in math games, for improving basic speed skills in mental math. No one wants to play a game of decoding differential equations and higher end calculus, except for those few and far between math majors, but nearly anyone can partake in a game of speedy arithmetic – and that’s essentially what Numbl is, coupled with the strategy of using the least moves possible to clear the entire board.

The game is shockingly good-looking. Good sound effects of the right pitch and digital cheeriness bring to mind a retro computer system, only it’s paired with a contemporary blue sheen that reminds me of the Chase credit card company. The setup reminds me of a calculator, with numbered buttons in a 5×4 area, an arrangement I suppose, is a good likeness to have when the game revolves around calculating a sum. The object of the game is to clear the board with the least moves as possible; in other words, it’s best to use the most numbers possible per turn, to faster eliminate numbers from the board. The number 11, for example, when shown at the top to be solved, could simply be solved by the addition of the two numbers 9 and 2. But, since 11 isn’t a terribly high number – as opposed to, say, 17 – then it’d be wiser to use an allotment of small numbers, like 3+2+2+4 – given of course, that you have these numbers available. Should you worry that you may receive a number that you cannot create with the remaining numbers at hand, fret not: Numbl takes into account such limitations and allows you to use a single number of equal value to the number at the top (e.g. use a 6 for a 6). Obviously, for the purposes of clearing the board, I recommend not to tap a number 9 to solve for 9 when you could instead use 2+2+5. Besides, when a pesky 17 shows up, you’ll want to have that 9 on hand.

Easy to pick up and easy to learn, Numbl also offers a nice split-screen mode for two-player. Also, both the one-player and two-player modes are timed, making speed a crucial element to the game. I prefer one-player, myself, because I enjoy improving my own mental acuity at my own pace (faster, Jackie, faster!), but to each his own. I hope in later versions Numbl will offer a similar version of play with subtraction, multiplication and division. You may as well cover all the preliminary bases, right? In any case, whoever is lucky enough to nab the sole promo code won’t regret downloading this game.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

Taken a little early when I hadn't upgraded, but really, it doesn't look much different now than it did at the time of this screenshot.

Let me start off by saying that Dragon Slaying ain’t easy. I suppose that’s to be expected when battling ancient beasts. You’re a single man, equipped with a single, stationary crossbow of mediocre power, that requires a slow, pulling back of the arrow for range, to then release and strike one flying dinosaur at a time. Another man accompanies you, awash perilously on the open waters with his small sailboat, assisting you only in gathering the dead meat of your fallen enemies, to make what I can only imagine to be the toughest meat patties ever. Food is of some value to this game, though of what I know not – I’ve played endless rounds of this game, with food supplies always hovering around 110 – 150, with seemingly no consequence, good or bad, for me. The most important element to this game is most assuredly the upgrading options: your single crossbow can only work so well, even with excellent marksmanship, and dinosaurs that appear in later levels require more arrow strikes to be killed. The first upgrade you’ll want, probably around Level 5 – when the purple, fire-breathing dinosaurs appear – is to increase your arrow’s hit points; of course, you have to save up 3,000 gold to invest in a laboratory first, before upgrading your arrows becomes a viable option. It makes a huge difference, and it’ll give you time to save for other important upgrades, like increasing your castle’s hitpoints, or shooting multiple arrows, perhaps building a forge.

The one, glaring problem with Dinosaur Slayer is that you probably will never see any of the cooler upgrades – things like mage guilds, magical powers, better arrows, and so forth. Generally, anything past the first row of upgrades takes some serious mastery at this game before you can even conceive of saving 20,000 gold. That’s a lot of gold for this game, when you collect a mere 50 gold or so per dinosaur you slay (maybe 10 appear per level). Of course, I imagine killing the boss has the potential to reap great rewards, but I have yet to beat the first boss -

These guys take 3 shots to kill if you haven't upgraded your arrows.

whether it’s the first of many, or the only one I cannot tell, because the bloody beast is so ridiculously difficult, and my castle cannot withstand the fiery punishment, that I lose within a matter of minutes. Glowing orbs appear where you’re supposed to strike with your arrows, but the ones situated near his back require you aiming around his head, which is so large that the arrows usually bounce right off its steely frame. Frustration city.

Upgrading aside, the game is actually really fun, and I thoroughly enjoy aiming for and killing the dinosaurs. The arrows make a nice thwump noise upon striking their flesh, and the dinosaurs screech before plummeting down to the water, where my trusty companion takes his time wading over to their floating bodies. The multiple arrows ability is super handy, and it’s utterly satisfying seeing two flying beasts go down at the same time. There’s a bit of strategy involved when moving the crossbow up and down (move your finger up and down along the screen), and it takes some adjustment to finally figure out a seamless way of aiming. I can seriously say I will continue playing this game until I defeat the boss dinosaur, this massive creature with beating wings that I must hit in certain spots to injure, and theoretically, eventually kill. Whether I continue playing the game after that is up in the air, but given the way things have been going, I’ll be playing Dinosaur Slayer for a really long time.

Curse you, oh undefeated nemesis!

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

In Soul the game starts with a beating heart on a black screen, with the title Soul etched faintly in glowing blue white. A beating heart in a black setting always conjures the most vivid of horror movies for me, so upon the sound of the flatline and the staticky emergence of the game, itself, I was gripped. The background story is vague, scant on those illustrious details inappropriate for most horror games, the only information given that you’re a dead man whose soul is on its path to heaven. It’s the mystery and unknown that keeps us wanting more, isn’t it?

Your dead character was, apparently, short on the good deeds in life because it seems his soul is stuck somewhere in limbo, stuck at the River Styx before the Elysian Fields, the blackness that pervades in between Heaven and Hell – the no man’s land, if you will. To find your way to Heaven, you must navigate the corridors of your once home, now dank and dark, twisted hellishly into some murky underworld rife with frightening monsters that gnash at you from within the darkness in the walls. It’s always the most unsuspecting moment when they strike, their blood red eyes focused intently on you, and deadly growls emitting from deep within their purple throats. Your soul, in the shape of a bright, white glowing orb, must carefully avoid these hellion creatures, and even the walls and floors. Souls are fragile things, shattered, apparently, by the most mundane of worldly objects.

The game maintains its creepy atmosphere with the usual tricks: flickering lights, dim corridors, the humming of elevators and washing machines from a decrepit building, the echoing of footsteps from an unknown source. What really ups the creep factor, though, are the excellent illustrations. Soul has all the grisly panache of a graphic novel, right down to the carefully sketched cracks in the plastered walls, exposing a section of layered brick beneath. The whole game has a sickly, gray pallor to it, tinged with green. The sound effects and the aesthetics, alone, make this game worth the great deal of frustration it is to actually play the game.

I played on Easy Mode (there is also Normal and Nightmare – I fret thinking about anything more difficult than Easy) and it was enough to make my palms sweat, not only in fear, but in rage. Your soul will shatter into a million splinters of light the moment you touch anything – anything at all. You can hold your finger on the screen to see the entire level, which really helps in figuring out the correct pathway -  choose the wrong way, and you’ll most likely run into a dead end, usually with some horrific beast ready to chomp you to bits. Navigating is just a matter of tilting your iPhone this way and that, but the dim lighting sometimes makes it difficult to play this game during broad daylight. I suppose it’s the developer’s secret desire to make this game easier to play at night; too bad half of my brain is screaming FU** THAT. Every now and then your soul runs through ghouls that bear a very similar appearance to Samara from The Ring, which is probably one of the scariest creature/ghouls/peoples to ever have struck horror on the big screen. In a flash of kitschy, gimmicky horror, the whole screen with flash to black with the briefest of subliminal images showing this black-haired, ghoul with gray pallor. Despite the thriller gimmick nature of it all, it works. I jump every time. The scream that accompanies the image helps. Or, is it just me screaming?

I’ve only made it through four levels, but despite my growing frustration, I want to see more of this game. Maybe I’m just drawn to anything dark and morbid, but there’s something a little fascinating about this game. It’s definitely difficult, and it’s definitely creepy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe I’m a little stuck in limbo, myself.

I’m talking about Pop Cap Game’s Bejeweled 2, of course. Or, even just Bejeweled. But, for the purposes of this review, I will be talking about the sequel in this acclaimed game – a game that many online players have idled away hours of their time in unproductivity, swapping and destroying gems, in some haze of OCD. Come to think of it, what is it about block-breaking games that hold our fascination so much? Does it just feed into the mindless, anal retentive qualities in all of us, making us pair like objects, and seeing them destroyed, then having a new stack fall into place, in some nonstop continuum of the same thing? It’s like peeling a giant stack of potatoes, or, as my boyfriend’s mom likes to say, it’s similar to knitting. Maybe there’s something inherently soothing to anything mechanical and orderly, giving the otherwise untapped mind a job, something menial and contrived to focus our energy. When playing Bejeweled 2, I feel like the intelligent, but otherwise neurotic Border Collie, who when given ample hours on end with nothing to do, finds himself staring at a dripping faucet, watching each drop fall in slow motion with the most rapt, inert attention. Actually, that’s a fairly accurate analogy for what playing Bejeweled 2 is like – a dripping faucet.

Perhaps, that’s where the sheer brilliance of Bejeweled 2 lies (and, I don’t just mean the jewels). I, for one, cannot put this game down. I probably wasted played a good one to two hours each day this week before I realized I had already done this before on the computer, in 2004. Oh, Bejeweled, how your witchery tricks me again and again. There’s no question Bejeweled 2 is an addictive game, and the legions of fans out there contributing to its success, both online and off, is a testament to the game’s lasting greatness. And, it’s just so darn simple to play.

The game of Bejeweled 2 is played on an 8×8 board, with some stratospheric background of the most spectacular origins, set somewhere on a distant planet, or in some fantasy dimension. The music, too, plays off this eccentric, futuristic, day-glo feel by featuring synthesized glam rock beats that would feel right at home in Blade Runner, or in a David Bowie music video. I really like the music – I pretend I’m in an anime, and with the bright colors, space atmosphere and beats, it’s hard not to feel that way. To boot, anytime you beat a level, a wormhole appears, resplendent in pastels and neons, to take you to the next level. Beating the levels is easy, at first, since the jewels on the playing field are easily matched up into pairs of 3 and siphoned away, for more jewels to take their place. The rules are short: swap one jewel with another adjacaent, and only when swapping lets you form a row of three (the game won’t let you move, otherwise). That’s it! If your swap forms a row of four jewels, then that jewel type will form a power gem, worth more points; if your row contains 5 jewels, then you’ll create a hypercube, which is the badass of all the jewels, earning you mondo points and explosions all around. You’ll make plenty more power gems than hypercubes, so take advantage of the former. The power gem not only earns you more points, it destroys the surrounding gems in a 2-block radius, leaving more room for new jewels to take place. It’s hard to beat the hypercube, though; when it’s formed, whichever jewel you choose to swap it with – let’s say a blue gem – then all the jewels of that kind on the board will be destroyed, in some cool, chain lightning effect. If you play in Action mode, this happens fairly often, given the set-up Bejeweled gives you. In Classic and Endless, it’s much more infrequent (Endless is the same as Classic Mode, only there’s no maximum amount of moves per level).

At the end of the day, all I can really say about Bejeweled 2 is… well, I can’t really think of anything to say. I’m completely dumbfounded and blinded and speechless. In fact, I think I need another look at the game, right now. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to you.

*dashes for iPhone*

Yikes! YIKES!

Back in October, David reviewed Jamzu, a strategy board game. The review is located here. Well, Jamzu has recently been revamped with 2 player mode on the same device (previously 2 player was only allowed through Wi-Fi) and a new rolling system that created, as the developer claims, “a huge boost in game play quality.” I spent a few days playing this new version of Jamzu and found that it’s a solid game, but it’s also an incredibly frustrating game and sometimes is seemingly unfair.

There are four levels of difficulty – Easy, Medium, Advanced and Expert. The instructions explain that the difficulty is based on the computer choosing a “weak” or “strong” evaluation (of the game board). The Easy setting uses the weak evaluation the entire time, the Medium uses the weak evaluation 2/3 of the time and the strong 1/3, and so on… To be perfectly honest, the game as it is should only have two difficulty settings, Normal and Hard, because Easy isn’t easy and anything above Easy is Hard.

After playing a half dozen or so games I started getting the hang of Jamzu. As it turned out I was playing on Expert, no wonder I was so frustrated! I switched the difficulty to Easy and was still frustrated. After another half dozen or so games I started to win. I switched the difficulty to Medium and was again confronted with frustration. I played 3 or 4 games and was in position to win, but every single time I was going to win my rolls started showing up as ones and twos, with the computer getting fours, fives and sixes. In one game I had two Runners two moves from the edge and one Runner three moves from the edge – that’s 3 Runners needing 7 moves. The computer had two Runners left and nine total moves between the two, with Jammers in blocking one of the Jammer’s way. Needless to say I lost. I rolled two ones and a two while the computer rolled a five six and something else. Utter, utter frustration. This happens a lot to me when playing on the Medium setting. It’s very discouraging. I went back to Easy, which was a little too easy for my liking, so I’ve been playing on Medium, despite the high level of frustration.

Enough about my frustrations, Jamzu is a good game. Try it, play it, master it, it’s not a hard game to figure out, but I suspect it is hard to master. The only thing I really dislike about the app is the opening screen backdrop… yikes! It’s straight out of the 80′s/90′s and does not compliment the graphics of the rest of the game which are overall nicely rendered and arranged. The game is quick and making moves is easy and accurate, now if they could only get that AI down!

Title Screen

I felt the name of this game calls for an exclamation mark. Lines of Mania, by Good Apps UG, is a strategy game based on a game that’s been played for years on paper (the Mexcian derivative is “Las Lineas”, “The Lines”, or “Numeros,” “Numbers”, according to my girlfriend). It’s really, really simple: connect the numbers in sequence and don’t tread on the same path twice. Oh yeah, and you can pass through numbers unscathed on your way to victory. There is a timer, and you have to get it done before time runs out in order to move on. If you do it particularly fast, you earn a star, and unlock more scenarios. There are multiple modes of play: Single Player mode has 3 scenarios – Classic, Skill and Mania (I think you can figure out which does what); Multi-player allows you the same scenarios but you alternate connecting numbers with the other players – up to 4, all on the same phone; Draw mode allows you to … draw whatever you want in different colors. There’s also a tutorial mode that I found helpful.

Level 10 and burnt out

Lines of Mania is great on paper, but it doesn’t stand its ground when held up to ridicule. What’s the problem? Well, I hate to say it, but the base of the game, connecting the dots, is the problem. The first and most obvious problem is that my fat man-fingers completely hide the line not allowing me to see anything I’m doing. The developer obviously knew this would happen, so they provide a little magnifying glass, the “Eye”, that shows what your line is doing at the foremost point. The problem with the Eye is that the area it shows is so small that it’s hard to judge exactly where you’re going and where you need to go. It’s turns out to be helpful but frustrating. The second problem is the response time is very bad. All the movements are accurately recorded, but there is a big time lag and it adds frustration to the point that I want to throw my iPhone. Not at anything in particular, I just want to hurl it and be done with the game.

Almost there!

I could expand on the complexity of the levels and the skill and strategy required, but it would be a waste: the game isn’t good enough to play beyond Classic mode, and even then it’s rough. There are some good concepts here, and the multi-player option could be really fun, but with the basic playability problems seen in Lines of Mania, it’s essentially a waste of time. In the end, Lines of Mania is great upon appearance and flashiness – the graphics are very good, the game is attractive, I want to play it – but the playing experience makes it so Revifrustrating that it’s just plain unplayable.

Gridiron Football

The late, great Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Football Season Is Over.” Nostalgia has set in and the Super Bowl was Sunday! Luckily, the next season starts March 5, 2010… for the players and coaches, that is: the rest of us will have to wait until September. Oi. Despite sports week ending last Friday, I think it’s time to take a look at a football app for the off-season. Could Gridiron Football be the app that tides you over?

Amid the plethora of Sports apps, especially Football-related apps, Gridiron, by David Hardenbrook, stands out. Not because it’s particularly flashy, slick or even great, but because it’s unique. It’s a turn-and-text-based strategy app that forces you to think methodically, like a coach rather than maniacally smudging the screen trying to make a play. It’s a lot to take in at first, but actually, despite the foreign look and feel, it’s very easy to pick up and play. I decided to jump in to a game after reading half way through the instructions.

Bombs away

There are two modes – Regular and “THE DRIVE!”. In the regular mode you can choose the length of the quarter, if you want to play another person or the computer, and whether you’re the Home or Away team. Once you start your game, the coin toss is automatically determined (randomly) and the winner chooses whether they kick or receive, etc.. The game is straight football. On offense you can choose which player you want to go to (two WRs, one TE, one Fullback, one Tailback and the QB – used for Quarterback sneaks). Each player has his strengths and weaknesses that you have to take into account when choosing the play. On the defensive side of the ball you can choose your formation and whether the defense is pass or run balanced – you can even drag your players around to customize the formation, which is pretty cool. In “THE DRIVE!” mode you get to basically run a 2 minute drill at the end of the 4th quarter and prove that you have the guts and arm of Peyton Manning Joe Montana.

I'm still catching my breath

Gridiron football claims to place focus on strategy in order to win. Well, that’s true, but what extent is it strategy and to what extent is it random? For three plays in a row I chose to throw deep into a zone with no defenders and all three times the pass was incomplete. Other times I ran into two linemen and gained 9 and 16 yards. I know it matters if the defense is pass or run focused, but this was just a little bit preposterous. Additionally, I found a pretty big glitch in the game: when customizing your defense, if you grab two players with two fingers and reposition them, new players are created. You can repeat this until every zone has two people in it. I don’t know if this makes a difference strategy-wise, because both times I did this the offense gained first down yardage, but it looks pretty intimidating!

And everyone thought the Patriots taping opponents was cheating!

Aside from this exploit the game is pretty solid. It runs fine (c’mon, there are no moving parts) and has enough variety to keep me playing for a while (unless I’m playing 15 minute quarters – WAY too long). It could use a few improvements: WiFi or Bluetooth multiplayer and the ability to flip the tight end would be good improvements. Also, a moving play clock would change the game a lot, and would allow for better use of time-outs (or use them at all). The ability to call a time out after viewing the setups could add complexity. And lastly: the game shouldn’t always show a brief tutorial when starting a new game, it’s very annoying.

If you’re looking for a different kind of Football game, one without the hitting and juking and injuries but with all of the intellectual stimuli that escape you on game day as you sit in your armchair with your beer cozy, Gridiron Football is the game for you.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

Every so often I come across a game that I can see myself playing over and over again. Or one, at least, that’s clever and quirky enough to wedge itself into my usual game rotation; given my obsessiveness over games, this is hardly a trifle characteristic. Bad Apples by Metaversal Studios is one such game that’s caught my eye in a good way. In a manner similar to games like Bookworm, Virus Laboratory, and Bejeweled, the objective of Bad Apples is to stack different types of objects atop and adjacent to one another, gathering them in likeness, until a gathering of three or more is created to earn you points. In the case of Bad Apples, the objects to be toyed with are fruit, including blueberries, pineapples, what look to be cherry tomatoes, and, what else? Bad apples.

To win in this game, you must pair together groups of three or more of like fruits – once they pair up, they’ll be juiced, as shown in your gradually increasing collective of juice to the right of the screen. Like any good, fresh squeezed fruit, the juice is bright and cheery looking, just glowing of vitamins and nutrients to make your hair and skin glow (gee, I’m not a juicer at all). In a humorous twist, much like Virus Laboratory, the fruits each wear an expression that gives them a faint, individual character. The pineapple, boasting a heritage from the tropics where he, no doubt, laid in the sun all day working on his glorious tan, dons a blindingly white smile that gives away his excess of bravado and self-confidence. The cherry tomato is squat and bug-eyed, with a goofy smile, a good example of any toy version of its larger fruit. The blueberry, meanwhile, with his frazzled lips and wide-eyed countenance is probably suffering from indigestion, a common side effect of too much Vitamin C. The last characters, the bad apples, are the worst kind of fruit – the spoiling kind, with a fuzzy, green hat of mold, and a foul penchant for making other, nearby fruit go bad and giving you an upset stomach. Nobody likes the bad apples. In this game, they just get in the way of other fruit gathering together, and if bad apples form a trio, then they’ll juice together and you’ll have rotten juice. Thankfully, you can get rid of them with the crusher fruits – which look like the spiky jackfruit, the largest of all fruits, and probably the strongest if they could muscle their way around – who crush any fruit beneath them, friend or foe.

Crushing bad apples earns you +40 points each time, so destroying them is definitely a positive strategy. Otherwise, pairs of three to four of good fruits earn you somewhere in the +120-140 range, which clearly helps you rack up points efficiently. Special fruit characters will appear that correspond to each fruit – blueberry, pineapple, cherry tomato – and when paired with their kin, they will also juice other kin onscreen in one giant whammy of a juicing spree, earning you tons of points. Depending on how well you do each level, you can also earn rewards, which have delightfully clever names that wouldn’t sound out of place at a smoothie or raw bar: fruit salad (to get it, group one of each of the three powerups – special fruit characters – in a single turn), the full bushel, easy as apple pie, fresh squeezed, king of the juice, and more. I rather liked how they threw in Tequila Sunrise, just for kicks. Pesticide is a really helpful award, which you can get by killing five worms using crushers or powerups. There’s really no need to elaborate on the Pesticide – it’s pretty self-explanatory. And, don’t worry about the worms until you upgrade to the full version – they don’t exist in the free version.

The free version is enough to keep me entertained, with three levels of difficulty, an arcade and puzzle mode  (exactly like the puzzle mode in Virus Laboratory), but I really would like to battle worms that rot apples (oh no!), so I’ll probably be upgrading to the full version soon. I recommend you to check it out today.

In Gluons, there are a variety of different colored atoms (I guess you could call them that, since subatomic particles theorized to bind quarks is a bit long) – including pink, red, blue, green, orange, white and black, that you must connect according to a set of rules. When free flying solo, any atom may be paired with another, regardless of color, but once connected in a pair, each individual atom may only be connected with an atom of the same color (e.g. an orange to an orange, a blue to a blue). Moving the atoms around onscreen involves the use of your thumbs – when both are pressed down on the iPhone screen, these vibrating frequency waves emit in circles that radiate out from your thumbs’ point of touch. The atoms bounce off these waves with a slight, sticky ricochet, as if they exist in an environment with little gravity. I suppose the weak gravity makes sense given the moon terrain backgrounds that change for each level.

Should you happen across a white atom – and you will, there are plenty in the starting levels – these flying orbs have the power to act as wild cards, able to connect to any color; therefore, should you have a set of connected atoms running blue, red, red, red, and a single pink atom floating around, then use the white atom to connect to either the blue or red atom at the chain’s end, and then connect the pink atom to the white one. They’re real combo savers, when used correctly, because more often than not, you’ll find yourself drowning in orbs that cannot be connected. Once you form a chain – the longer, the better – let it fall toward the power beam at the bottom of the screen, the one that looks like a fusion reactor, and your chain will be atomized, earning you points depending on the length of your chain. Obviously, you want to earn as many points as possible, given the allotted time per level. So, it’s best to aim for longer chains despite solo atoms falling into the power beam earning you points, as well – just nowhere near as many.

The black ones are the ones to watch out for. Of no positive use, the black atoms serve only to destroy both your chains and the whole power beam, gradually. A black atom may be destroyed by knocking into it with a larger chain – it’ll break apart, but at least the atoms will be preserved. If a single atom or pair or two collide with a black atom, then the black atom will obliterate them, and obliterate any chance of you forming a chain with those orbs and using them for points. Also, as if these crimes weren’t bad enough, should any lone black atom fall into the power beam, points get knocked off your score, and the power beam loses life. Solution? Get rid of the black atoms!

I really like the premise of the game – it’s simple, colorful, and it’s a bit like a puzzle, all of which are great in my book. However, the main challenging point of this game isn’t that the strategy involved is terribly difficult – it’s more that the game, itself, is technically challenging. It’s really difficult to route a ricocheted course for your atoms when they bounce off your thumbs, and so connecting them because of game of your patience and wits. It can become frustrating, especially when the tempo of the game increases, and the chains spiral around maddeningly before falling to the power beam. Also, sometimes there’s a glitch where the atoms just fall straight through your thumbs, and you’re unable to bounce them. Sometimes, I wonder if there’s any strategy involved other than luck. In some ways, it’s easier if you tap the screen frequently, adding more atoms to the screen, in the likelihood there will be more than enough to create long chains, simply from floating around together.

But, I enjoy the game, strategy or not, and I enjoy connecting and destroying things, especially when it involves atomizing.

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